The University of Oregon / Eugene has a radical student group that has published a magazine called “The Student Insurgent” for quite a few years now. Since I’m a bike culture person of zinester ancestry I’m on their mailing list. I’m probably on other lists, too, thanks to their magazine title!
It’s interesting to me how often bike culture and make-do, can-do DIY/indie culture gets connected to anarchist efforts.
I suppose it’s because anarchy is about questioning and respect. It’s not about being wild’n’crazy. Revved-up people are easily exploited, but anarchy is about paying attention, about studying exploitation. Sure, Circle-A often goes astray, but the main tenets of anarchy are: voluntarism and critique. No coercion. Free humans have to agree to do what they do. They have the right to refuse.
The “SI” zine includes what I see as a lot of leftist boilerplate written by privileged college kids being angry about their privilege. They adopt a new set of blinders and clique behavior even as they ostensibly work to question the same. But they make a lot of good points and work on and report on a lot of helpful projects.
They cover homelessness, addiction, old-growth logging protests, mind-expansion, all sorts of liberation and anti-oppression stuff.
…Among these I see quite a few bike culture reports and make-do lifestyle info. I suppose it’s because bikes and juryrigging both let people live more free. A bike is a liberation machine.
The cute little biking raccoon sketch illustrated a how-to essay on dumpster-diving.
Their blog, which I link to here, seems less lively, but it has highlights as well. I think these efforts are best when they report on people’s actual experiences. Now, the reality of some of these is sometimes different from what the reporter thinks it is, but that’s always the case, I suppose. The disconnect seems to happen most when a political interpretation is applied, which maybe happens the most in political action reports.
At any rate it’s neat reading of the learning experiences of young people, even when they don’t think they’re learning and instead think they’re declaring or “telling it how it is.”
The blog entry I link to here is an example of the Life Experience report that zines like “SI” are good at:
uoinsurgent.blogspot.com/2009/03/poetic-terrorism.html
https://uoinsurgent.blogspot.com/2009/03/poetic-terrorism.html
